Improved depth of focus, resolution, and viewing angle integral imaging for 3D TV and display

In this paper, we present methods to improve resolution, viewing angle, and image depth in II. In integral imaging (II), three-dimensional (3-D) images are formed by integrating the rays coming from two-dimensional (2-D) elemental images using a lenslet (or pinhole) array. In II, one of the most fundamental factors that limits the resolution of the reconstructed 3D image is the pitch of the lenslet arrays, which determines the sampling rate of the rays in the spatial dimension. The viewing angle Ψ can be defined as a range of diverging angle over which one can see only the zero-order reconstructed 3D image. One cannot integrate rays to produce 3-D images with arbitrarily large depth in II. This can be easily understood buy considering that point images are to be displayed in the real image field (z>0) by use of an ideal diffraction-limited II system.